Dear Evelyn is the winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.  The jury citation reads:

“Kathy Page’s Dear Evelyn tells the tender and unsettling story of working-class Londoner Harry Miles and the ambitious Evelyn Hill who fall in love as the world around them goes to war. What initially begins as a familiar wartime love story morphs into a startling tale of time’s impact on love and family, as well as one’s complex search for  personal meaning and truth. By integrating themes that are universally understood by readers and skilfully crafting endearing characters that surprise and delight, Kathy Page has created a poignant literary work of art. The result is a timeless page-turning masterpiece.”

Inspired by original  love letters from the 1940’s,  Dear Evelyn follows a seventy-year-long wartime marriage between two seemingly incompatible partners in sometimes tender, sometimes excruciating detail. Studded with allusions to poems and novels, it is set in locations that include London during the 1920s and 1940s, Tunisia during World War Two, the Cotswolds, a new post-war suburb, and a Mediterranean cruise ship.

The protagonist, Harry Miles, is born on a working-class London street, wins a scholarship, and grows into a sensitive man torn between a love of poetry and a more prosaic ability to understand what is required of him and do it. Evelyn, the magnetic and demanding woman whom he marries as WW2 breaks out, increasingly tests Harry’s capacity to love. This is a love story, albeit an unconventional one. It plunges the reader into Harry’s emotional life, and studies two people who shape each other in the course of a shared lifetime—withholding judgment as to whether this is, ultimately, for better, or for worse.

According to The Times Literary Supplement “…this tender portrait achieves the tautness of a thriller… Page has laid bare the lives of her characters, making no claims to their significance to anyone but each other, and in doing so has demonstrated that the ordinary is infinitely precious.” https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/cleaving-to-real-life/

The Globe and Mail:  “A deep character study that makes one writhe and cringe and admire at the same time.. a novel of sadness about love and its waste, and about the humiliation of aging. It made me cry my eyes out.”

BT interview with Kathy Page after winning the Rogers WT prize  

Donna Bailey Nurse pairs Dear Evelyn with An American Marriage

More Praise for Dear Evelyn

“The seven ages of man, and woman, are traced against the tremendous historical and social shifts of a switchback century…quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing….Page’s watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end. A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.” Kirkus (starred review)

Quill & Quire: “Page’s finely wrought story – by turns tender, acid, and poignant – reminds us that marriage is a condition as infinitely variable as the individuals who enter into it… Page’s touching novel makes the ordinary extraordinary.”

The Guardian: “Page’s eighth novel is many things: a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a brilliantly evocative sketch of Britain in the 20th century.”  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/12/dear-evelyn-kathy-page-review

“A novel that will fill your heart, and break it, too.” Parry Sound North  Star

“With tender, ruthless insight, Kathy Page exposes the secret machinations of a longstanding marriage in her brilliant new novel, Dear Evelyn. Caught in our own brief liaisons, we watch with longing (and horror) as Harry and Evelyn move from breathless first love to the divorce that death inevitably exacts. However you are coupled, you will never look at your partner the same way again.”  Merilyn Simonds, author of  The Convict Lover

“Dear Evelyn is not only the work of a sublime and compassionate imagination, but one that exhibits, extraordinarily, both the sweep of the epic novel and the taut concision of the short story.  Page has reached across the generations to portray a couple through childhood, youth and middle age, right to the final humiliations of their advanced years.  Intimately inhabiting their struggles, she has created a love story “both absurd and brave, both ordinary and magnificent.” This book about two lifetimes will stay with me through mine.” Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces

“This is an outstanding novel: gripping and profound, richly imagined, fiercely intelligent.  With emotional depth and flawless grasp of period, Kathy Page draws us into the lives of Harry and Evelyn as they confront two world wars, their own relationship, and the social challenges of the twentieth century.” Ronald Wright,  author of The Gold Eaters and A Short History of Progress